I remember my arrest. It was May of 1972 and Nixon had just mined Haiphong Harbor. The year before, I had accepted a pulpit in Sudbury, Massachusetts, a bucolic, Yankee exurb west of Boston and had helped form a small, rabbinic study hevra (group). Each weekly session, however, it seemed, began with a new and more infuriating news item about the escalation of the war. The government claimed possession of secret information it could not reveal. We felt powerless, ineffectual. All our sermons were preaching to the choir.
My own moment of decision was hardly the result of some evolved moral calculus. Whenever I would meet a German, I found myself wanting to ask what he had done while the Nazis had murdered my people. It dawned on me that, if I could ask this of a German, then, I should be prepared to answer the same question...
